Fueling Product Innovation through Life Cycle Assessment

SOFTWARE The manufacturing phase of a toaster, includes bill of material and manufacturing processes for the plastic housing, metals parts, electronics and packaging.

Source: Sustainable Minds

FUELING PRODUCT INNOVATION Using life-cycle thinking can help facilitate innovations, rather than limit them.

by kimi ceridon Kimi Ceridon is director of sustainability services at Sustainable Minds, Cambridge, Mass.

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any companies find that integrating life-cycle thinking and sustainability is a way to facilitate innovation. With life-cycle thinking, product teams are not limited to looking at just function, they are free to examine every aspect of a product’s life starting at the source of materials to the manufacturing processes to the transportation to the consumer interaction—and ending with what happens at the end of the product’s life. This expanded view of a product presents endless opportunities to improve or innovate new products. The result is more sustainable products than their predecessors and, commonly, more successful products.

Think of the life of a typical household toaster. The toaster’s life is examined through its impact on the Earth’s environment or its ecological impact using a lifecycle assessment (LCA) software. To take a peek at how LCA quantifies the ecological impacts of a product’s life cycle, the methodology and science behind an LCA are examined in this article.

Integrating a life-cycle assessment enables innovation through sustainability. It’s important to evaluate how product teams can incorporate life-cycle thinking into their own projects and how best to facilitate this process.

Life of a Toaster For consumers, a toaster begins life at the moment of purchase. Actually, they bring it to life when they plug it in and begin toasting with it. A toaster’s life ends when consumers decide it is no longer usable and it is left on a curbside for pick up. To customers, a toaster’s life is limited to the time it is owned.

For a product development team, the life of a toaster begins when a product idea is born—well before the purchase. The idea passes through various stages such as concept generation, prototyping and testing, detailing, and production and manufacturing before it reaches the shelf. Rarely does this extend to what happens to the toaster after disposal. At best, maintenance and spare parts are considered. Beyond requesting venFor more information on suppliers in this issue, take the at www.appliancedesign.com/taxi

SOFTWARE

Below is a summary of inputs and outputs captured in a life-cycle assessment.

Source: Sustainable Minds

Inputs

Materials Energy Water Air

Outputs

Materials acquistion

PRINCIPAL PRODUCTS

Formulation, processing, and manufacturing

CO-PRODUCTS

Distribution and transportation

WATER EFFLUENTS

Product use, reuse, maintenance

AIRBORNE EMISSIONS

Recycle products, components, materials

SOLID WASTE OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL INTERACTIONS

Waste management

Impact Characterization Data undergoes impact characterization to convert LCI to relevant categories with equivalent units. The EPA’s Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and Other Environmental Impacts (TRACI) defines categories that may include acidification, ecotoxicity, global warming, ozone depletion, water eutrophication, fossil fuel depletion, human carcinogens, human respiratory, human toxicity and photochemical smog. For example, global warming is characterized through equivalent pounds of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in Sustainable Minds’ software.

Normalization and Weighing dors to make parts from drawings, other processes are not examined in detail.

Both perspectives offer insight into the toaster’s ecological impacts, but they are incomplete views. While owned, the toaster has impact through its electricity consumption, but this does not account for the impacts due to the manufacturing, transportation or disposal of the toaster.

A comprehensive evaluation of the ecological impacts needs a broader definition of its lifetime. The life of the toaster really begins at the source where the raw materials are produced. These materials undergo processing before becoming the raw materials needed for manufacturing. Manufacturing and assembly make the parts, and assemblies, packaging and peripherals comprise everything that makes up the final product. This is the manufacturing phase of the product’s life.

The toaster arrives at the store and consumers purchase it and put it to use. This is the use phase of the life cycle. When it is no longer useful, it moves on to the end-of-life phase. The toaster rests in a landfill, is incinerated in a municipal incinerator, or is partially or fully recycled. Throughout this process are elements of transportation including moving ore, raw materials, manufactured parts, assemblies, packaged products and trash.

Comprehensive life-cycle assessments factor in all elements of a product’s life cycle.

For example, the source of aluminum parts is a bauxite mine, and the source of plastic parts is the oil well. It is not exclusively about raw materials for the product itself, but it is also about the coal for the energy or land for infrastructure. A toaster may also enter endof-life for reasons other than wear and tear such as obsolescence.

Each stage requires resource inputs and results in outputs. One output is the product, but other outputs are effluents and emis-

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sions. For example, to stamp a steel housing, a piece of sheet metal output from an earlier process is an input. Other inputs are electricity for stamping, water for cooling and land infrastructure.

Life-Cycle Inventory As one might imagine, evaluating ecological impacts by examining each stage of a life cycle is a difficult task. Calculating individual contributions from all inputs and outputs of the life is a big task even for a simple product such as a toaster. This is where an LCA with established database sets helps simplify this task. The core of an LCA is the data associated with the life-cycle processes that comprise the life-cycle inventory (LCI).

LCIs draw information from established databases built through surveys, research, physical and chemical process and regional inputs accessed through purchase of or subscription to sets of data. LCA software, such as from Sustainable Minds, draws information from two sources, the EcoInvent database and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) growing U.S. LCI database.

Processes selected for manufacturing, use, and end-of-life phases, build a product’s LCI. In such software, a user selects the processes by building a system bill of materials (SBOM) that includes all of these phases.

Companies should also normalize each category in relation to a reference value such as estimated impacts per category due an average person in the U.S. over one year. The result is a single common unit for all impact categories that can be summed into a single score in units such as points (Pt).

Weighing is the final step for assigning the overall impacts of the product’s life cycle.

This socially defined step assigns relative importance to each category.

Functional Unit As with other analytic tools, results are meaningless without context. Stresses calculated for a part are meaningless without the ultimate strength. With life-cycle assessments, context is provided through comparison to a goal or reference value. These values are established early in a study and maintained for all products being compared to it.

To maintain consistency, establishing a robust functional unit allows apple-to-apples comparisons throughout the study. For example, the toaster functional unit may be hour of use, piece of toast delivered or joules of heat delivered.

The functional unit is then related back to life cycle by evaluating how many functional units are used over the product’s life.

Impacts are aggregated over the lifetime per

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Sustainable Minds’ LCA software uses guidance from U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) to define weighing values. Source: Sustainable Minds applianceDESIGN

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SOFTWARE

A design for disassembly option may not be realistic or possible for all products, but many more scenarios can be explored. Source: Sustainable Minds

functional unit delivered.

The Assessment While it may appear that an LCA requires a great deal of work to arrive at a score, much of the work is accomplished by applying the LCA methodology. Software options are designed to minimize difficulty for arriving at a single score to allow non-LCA experts to evaluate environmental impacts for making design decisions throughout the product development process.

A product SBOM is built using the materials and weights of each part in the bill of material. The use-phase adds energy the toaster consumes over its lifetime. Evaluating energy consumption may include referring to product literature, design specifications, user-behavior studies or physical measurements including consideration of different use intensities such as from sleep versus use modes. The energy consumption of a toaster is represented by the energy for one hour of on-time multiplied but the estimated total hours of life. The total hours may not be related to the designed life, but rather to the typical hours consumers use it.

End- of-Life Phase The end-of-life may seem trivial, but determining it may require review of industry studies, regional services or user-behavior studies.

Various scenarios for the end-of-life of the toaster can reveal opportunities that exist for improving the product’s impacts by designing to encourage end-of-life behaviors. Within the software, copying concepts to modify the SBOM allows an easy way to explore alternative scenarios. As a baseline, incinerating the toaster at its end-of-life is used.

Transportation considerations include transportation occurring throughout the entire life of the product. Transportation can be a complex issue when considering transporting ore to processors, material to manufacturers, parts to assemblers, assemblies to distribution centers, products to customers and homes and trash to landfills.

Results To view results, overall impacts can be divided according to impact categories, items in the SBOM or life-cycle phase. The total carbon footprint may be viewed with graphs divided according to items in the SBOM or life cycle phase.

In our toaster example, results show the largest portion of the toaster’s score is due to incinerating low alloyed steel components. Four of the 10 highest SBOM impacts 16 applianceDESIGN August 2010

are due to end-of-life impacts. There is an opportunity to improve the environmental performance by redesigning the product to encourage recycling or implement a manufacturer take-back program.

Designing for Disassembly Low-allow steel and stainless steel are accepted at many recycling facilities. Initial redesign efforts can focus on incorporating means to disassemble the toaster so the base components are separable for recycling.

Incorporating design for disassembly can

result in 75% reduction in overall environmental impacts.

Interestingly, by examining the whole life cycle, the opportunity for improving the toaster is not related to changing how the bread is toasted but rather in changing how to dispose of the toaster.

Further innovation and additional impact reductions could be explored in evaluating other aspects of the life cycle. A design for disassembly option may not be realistic or possible for all products, but many more scenarios can be explored.

With the help of LCA software, concepts For more information on suppliers in this issue, take the at www.appliancedesign.com/taxi

SOFTWARE can be easily created to explore changes to portions of the life cycle or to entertain entirely new concepts.

Beyond the Toaster Beyond the toaster example, the question is how can this comprehensive approach to LCA integrate into current product development methods? The goal is to not only decrease the environmental impacts of a product but also spur innovative new solutions in the product space.

By nature, product development focuses on designing products to deliver a service— in the case of this article the service is to toast a piece of bread. Product development teams typically remain focused on that service and rarely step back to look at the system or the life cycle. Designers need quantifiable insights into this larger system to expand opportunities for product innovation.

Ecodesign Practices An appliance’s life extends beyond the time it spends in the kitchen and includes manufacturing, use and end-of-life phases.

Each phase is sprinkled with transportation

and logistics necessary for making, moving and disposing of the product.

Life-cycle inventory passes through the lens of a life-cycle methodology including impact characterization, normalization and weighing. The final result is a score summarizing ecological impacts into a single value.

Within each life-cycle phase there are many opportunities for intervention and innovation. Ecodesign starts at the beginning of the design process when the initial product specifications are set. This is the time to establish ecological impact specifications and goals. Outlining the ecological impacts of previous year’s products can help reveal opportunities for improvement.

The process may involve evaluating stateof-the-art sustainability strategies such as new materials and emerging technologies, and comparing results to ecodesign strategies such as performance optimization and material minimization. Such exploration allows design teams to capture strategies offering the best opportunity for product success.

During concept generation, teams can use this knowledge to generate solutions that span the entire life cycle of the product. Concept generation goes beyond service

delivery to exploring life-cycle improvement concepts. The opportunity for an innovation may come out of looking at life cycle rather than product function.

Details contained within a final concept provide information to aid in building an LCA associated with labeling requirements for ISO environmental standards, for example. This information can reduce the cost of meeting this standard.

The final product may not have the lowest ecological impact of all of the prototypes explored due to tradeoffs with performance, cost, schedule or other barriers, however, it is likely that the final product results in a lower ecological impact than if it were designed without any ecological impact considerations or measurements.

Establishing ecological impact specifications and goals at the start of the product development process and implementing an LCA tool to revisit those ecological impacts specifications and goals throughout the product development phases result in greener product designs. < For more information, visit: www.sustainableminds.com

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